The computer saga continues….
After my motherboard blew, I remembered there were a couple of old boards at the bottom of my Big Box of Computer Bits. I went a looked, and joy, both of them took my processor and memory. One of them, I knew, wasn’t working (don’t ask me why I’d kept it); I was pretty sure the other one was OK. Anyway, guess which one I tried first, spending about two hours wrestling with the heatsink and going squinty-eyed from trying to decipher the inadequate diagrams…? A banana to the gentleman at the back!
Anyway, the second one turned out to be good(ish). It didn’t take the new DDR400 memory that I’d bought, but never mind, the stick of DDR330 memory that had originally been in my machine fitted.
Upon connecting up (nearly) everything and switching it on, all seemed well – it seemed that all I had to do was download and install the board drivers. Then… (yes, there is always a then…) I noticed that I hadn’t attached the CD/DVD drive.
I did so. And everything went tits-up. A big red message on the bootup screen, with enough exclamation marks to earn the envy of any teenage texter, informed me that I needed to turn the CD drive from secondary slave to secondary master before it would proceed any further.
After several frustrating hours of fiddling with the BIOS and consulting online forums, I haven’t got an answer – beyond permanently unplugging the drive’s data cable, so I can’t play CDs or DVDs. The floppy drive was already dead, so the only external storage I now have is my little pen flash drive.
So it looks like I still need a new motherboard. Sigh.

ETA: Fixed it. After hours of swapping cables etc. I looked at the CD drive and had a “D’oh!!” moment. Until then I had never realised that CD drives had jumpers just like hard drives. Resetting the jumper from ‘slave’ to ‘master’ did the trick.
Still got the sound to sort out, but otherwise the system is usable. Now for tea.